Ron Paul
Ronald Ernest Paul is an American author and retired politician who served as the U. S. Representative for Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, for Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. On three occasions, he sought the presidency of the United States: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and as a candidate in the Republican primaries of 2008 and 2012. Paul is a critic of the federal government's fiscal policies the existence of the Federal Reserve and the tax policy, as well as the military–industrial complex, the War on Drugs, he has been a vocal critic of mass surveillance policies such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance programs. He was the first chairman of the conservative PAC Citizens for a Sound Economy and has been characterized as the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement. Paul served as a flight surgeon in the U. S. Air Force from 1963 to 1968, worked as an obstetrician-gynecologist from the 1960s to the 1980s.
He became the first Representative in history to serve concurrently with a son or daughter in the Senate when his son, Rand Paul, was elected to the U. S. Senate from Kentucky in 2010. Paul is a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute, has published a number of books and promoted the ideas of economists of the Austrian School such as Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises during his political campaigns. On July 12, 2011, Paul announced that he would forgo seeking another term in Congress in order to focus on his presidential bid. On May 14, 2012, Paul announced that he would not be competing in any other presidential primaries but that he would still compete for delegates in states where the primary elections have been held. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Paul received 190 delegate votes. In January 2013, Paul retired from Congress but still remains active on college campuses, giving speeches promoting his libertarian vision. Paul received one electoral vote from a Texas faithless elector in the 2016 presidential election, making him the oldest person to receive an electoral vote, as well as the second registered Libertarian presidential candidate in history to receive an Electoral College vote after John Hospers.
Ronald Ernest Paul was born on August 20, 1935, in Pittsburgh, the son of Howard Caspar Paul, who ran a small dairy company, Margaret Paul. His paternal grandfather emigrated from Germany, his paternal grandmother, a devout Christian, was a first-generation German American; as a junior at suburban Dormont High School, he was the 200 meter dash state champion. Paul went to Gettysburg College, he graduated with a B. S. degree in Biology in 1957. Paul earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Duke University's School of Medicine in 1961, completed his medical internship at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh. Paul served as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and in the United States Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968. Paul and his wife relocated to Texas, where he began a private practice in obstetrics and gynecology. While a medical resident in the 1960s, Paul was influenced by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which caused him to read other publications by Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand.
He came to know economists Hans Sennholz and Murray Rothbard well, credits his interest in the study of economics to them. When President Richard Nixon "closed the gold window" by ending American participation in the Bretton Woods System, thus ending the U. S. dollar's loose association with gold on August 15, 1971, Paul decided to enter politics and became a Republican candidate for the United States Congress. In 1974, incumbent Robert R. Casey defeated him for the 22nd district. President Gerald Ford appointed Casey to direct the Federal Maritime Commission, Paul won an April 1976 special election to the vacant office after a runoff. Paul lost the next regular election to Democrat Robert Gammage by fewer than 300 votes, but defeated Gammage in a 1978 rematch, was reelected in 1980 and 1982. Gammage underestimated Paul's popularity among local mothers: "I had real difficulty down in Brazoria County, where he practiced, because he'd delivered half the babies in the county. There were only two obstetricians in the county, the other one was his partner."
Paul served in Congress three different periods: first from 1976 to 1977, after he won a special election from 1979 to 1985, from 1997 to 2013. In his early years, Paul served on the House Banking Committee, where he blamed the Federal Reserve for inflation and spoke against the banking mismanagement that resulted in the savings and loan crisis. Paul argued for a return to the gold standard maintained by the US from 1873–1933, with Senator Jesse Helms convinced the Congress to study the issue, he spoke against the reinstatement of registration for the military draft in 1980, in opposition to President Jimmy Carter and the majority of his fellow Republican members of Congress. During his first term, Paul founded the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting principles of limited government and free-market economics. In 1984, Paul became the first chairman of the Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative political group founded by Charles and David Koch "to fight for less government, lower taxes, less regulation."
CSE started a Tea Party protest against high taxes in 2002. In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two new organizations, with Citizens for a Sound Economy being renamed as FreedomWorks, Cit
Societal collapse
Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society. Such a disintegration may be abrupt, as in the case of Maya civilization, or gradual, as in the case of the fall of the Western Roman Empire; the subject of societal collapse is of interest in such fields as history, sociology, political science, more complex-systems science. Common factors that may contribute to societal collapse are economical, environmental and cultural, disruptions in one domain sometimes cascade into others. In some cases a natural disaster may precipitate a collapse. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation or resource depletion might be the proximate cause of collapse. Significant inequity may combine with lack of loyalty to established political institutions and result in an oppressed lower class rising up and seizing power from a smaller wealthy elite in a revolution; the diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures. Jared Diamond suggests that societies have collapsed through deforestation, loss of soil fertility, restrictions of trade and/or rising endemic violence.
The decline of the Roman Empire is one of the events traditionally marking the end of Classical Antiquity and the beginning of the European Middle Ages. Throughout the 5th century, the Empire's territories in western Europe and northwestern Africa, including Italy, fell to various invading or indigenous peoples in what is sometimes called the Barbarian invasions, although the eastern half still survived with borders intact for another two centuries; this view of the collapse of the Roman Empire is challenged, however, by modern historians who see Rome as transforming from the Western Empire into barbarian kingdoms as the Western Emperors delegated themselves out of existence, the East transforming into the Byzantine Empire, which only fell in 1453 AD. North Africa's populous and flourishing civilization collapsed after exhausting its resources in internal fighting and suffering devastation from the invasion of the Bedouin tribes of Banu Sulaym and Banu Hilal. Ibn Khaldun noted that the lands ravaged by Banu Hilal invaders had become arid desert.
In the brutal pillaging that followed Mongol invasions, the invaders decimated the populations of China, the Middle East, Islamic Central Asia. Mongol leaders, such as Timur, destroyed many cities, slaughtered thousands of people and did irreparable damage to the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia; these invasions transformed a settled society to a nomadic one. Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. Smallpox ravaged Mexico in the 1520s, killing 150,000 in Tenochtitlán alone, including the emperor, Peru in the 1530s, aiding the European conquerors; some believe that the death of up to 95% of the Native American population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases although new research suggests tuberculosis from seals and sea lions played a significant part. Variolous matter was included in the ship inventories of the Australian first settlement, a smallpox epidemic spread across the continent 3 years after European settlement.
Societal collapse of many indigenous cultures has occurred as a result of European imperialism in various parts of the globe in areas where European settler communities took possession of land once held by native peoples, in Latin America and North America, in Australasia. The effects of this dispossession are still evident in many of the problems confronting indigenous cultures, including alcoholism, high rates of incarceration, suicide rates and fraternal violence; the Greek historian Polybius, writing in The Histories blamed the decline of the Hellenistic world on low fertility rates: In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us…. For this evil grew upon us and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury.
In a speech to Roman nobles, Emperor Augustus commented on the low birthrates of the Roman elite: How otherwise shall families continue? How can the commonwealth be preserved if we neither marry nor produce children? You are not expecting some to spring up from the earth to succeed to your goods and to public affairs, as myths describe, it is neither pleasing to Heaven nor creditable that our race should cease and the name of Romans meet extinguishment in us, the city be given up to foreigners,—Greek or barbarians. We liberate slaves chiefly for the purpose of making out of them as many citizens as possible. Upon the establishment of the Roman Empire, Augustus introduced legislation designed to increase the birthrate of the Roman nobility. There are three main types of collapse: Reversion/Simplification: A society's adaptive capacity may be reduced by either a rapid change in population or societal complexity, destabilizing its institutions and causing massive shifts in population and other social
Cornelius Van Til
Cornelius Van Til was a Dutch-American Christian philosopher and Reformed theologian, credited as being the originator of modern presuppositional apologetics. Van Til was the sixth son of Ite van Til, a dairy farmer, his wife Klasina van der Veen. At the age of ten, he moved with his family to Indiana, he was the first of his family to receive a higher education. In 1914 he attended Calvin Preparatory School, graduated from Calvin College, attended one year at Calvin Theological Seminary, where he studied under Louis Berkhof, but he transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary and graduated with his PhD from Princeton University, he began teaching at Princeton Seminary, but shortly went with the conservative group that founded Westminster Theological Seminary, where he taught for forty-three years. He taught apologetics and systematic theology there until his retirement in 1972 and continued to teach until 1979, he was a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church from the 1930s until his death in 1987, in that denomination, he was embroiled in a bitter dispute with Gordon Clark over God's incomprehensibility known as the Clark–Van Til Controversy.
Van Til drew upon the works of Dutch Calvinist philosophers such as D. H. Th. Vollenhoven, Herman Dooyeweerd, Hendrik G. Stoker and theologians such as Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper to devise a novel Reformed approach to Christian apologetics, one that opposed the traditional methodology of reasoning on the supposition that there is a neutral middle-ground, upon which the non-Christian and the Christian can agree, his contribution to the Neo-Calvinist approach of Dooyeweerd and others, was to insist that the "ground motive" of a Christian philosophy must be derived from the historical terms of the Christian faith. In particular, he argued that the Trinity is of indispensable and insuperable value to a Christian philosophy. In Van Til: The Theologian, John Frame, a sympathetic critic of Van Til, claims that Van Til's contributions to Christian thought are comparable in magnitude to those of Immanuel Kant in non-Christian philosophy, he indicates that Van Til identified the disciplines of systematic theology and apologetics, seeing the former as a positive statement of the Christian faith and the latter as a defense of that statement – "a difference in emphasis rather than of subject matter."
Frame summarizes Van Til's legacy as one of new applications of traditional doctrines: Unoriginal as his doctrinal formulations may be, his use of those formulations – his application of them – is quite remarkable. The sovereignty of God becomes an epistemological, as well as a religious and metaphysical principle; the Trinity becomes the answer to the philosophical problem of the many. Common grace becomes the key to a Christian philosophy of history; these new applications of familiar doctrines increase understanding of the doctrines themselves, for come thereby to a new appreciation of what these doctrines demand of. Van Til's application of the doctrines of total depravity and the ultimate authority of God led to his reforming of the discipline of apologetics, he denied neutrality on the basis of the total depravity of man and the invasive effects of sin on man's reasoning ability and he insisted that the Bible, which he viewed as a divinely inspired book, be trusted preeminently because he believed the Christian's ultimate commitment must rest on the ultimate authority of God.
As Frame says elsewhere, "the foundation of Van Til's system and its most persuasive principle" is a rejection of autonomy since "Christian thinking, like all of the Christian life, is subject to God's lordship". However, it is this feature that has caused some Christian apologists to reject Van Til's approach. For instance, D. R. Trethewie describes Van Til's system as nothing more than "a priori dogmatic transcendental irrationalism, which he has attempted to give a Christian name to." It is claimed that Fideism describes the view of fellow Dutchman Abraham Kuyper, whom Van Til claimed as a major inspiration. Van Til is seen as taking the side of Kuyper against his alma mater, Princeton Seminary, against Princeton professor B. B. Warfield, but Van Til described his approach to apologetics as a synthesis of these two approaches: "I have tried to use elements both of Kuyper's and of Warfield's thinking." Greg Bahnsen, a student of Van Til and one of his most prominent defenders and expositors, wrote that "A person who can explain the ways in which Van Til agreed and disagreed with both Warfield and Kuyper, is a person who understands presuppositional apologetics."With Kuyper, Van Til believed that the Christian and the non-Christian have different ultimate standards, presuppositions that color the interpretation of every fact in every area of life.
But with Warfield, he believed that a rational proof for Christianity is possible: "Positively Hodge and Warfield were quite right in stressing the fact that Christianity meets every legitimate demand of reason. Christianity is not irrational. To be sure, it must be accepted on faith, but it must not be taken on blind faith. Christianity is capable of rational defense." And like Warfield, Van Til believed that the Holy Spirit will use arguments against unbelief as a means to convert non-believers. Van Til sought a third way from Warfield, his answer to the question "How do you argue with someone who has different presuppositions?" is the transcendental argument, an argument that seeks to prove that certain presuppositions are necessary for the possibility of rationality. The Christian and non-Christian have different presuppositions, according to Van Til
Austrian School
The Austrian School is a heterodox school of economic thought, based on methodological individualism—the concept that social phenomena result from the motivations and actions of individuals. The Austrian School originated in late-19th and early-20th century Vienna with the work of Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser and others, it was methodologically opposed to the Prussian Historical School. Current-day economists working in this tradition are located in many different countries, but their work is still referred to as Austrian economics. Among the theoretical contributions of the early years of the Austrian School are the subjective theory of value, marginalism in price theory and the formulation of the economic calculation problem, each of which has become an accepted part of mainstream economics. Since the mid-20th century, mainstream economists have been critical of the modern day Austrian School and consider its rejection of mathematical modelling and macroeconomic analysis to be outside mainstream economics, or "heterodox".
Although the Austrian School has been considered heterodox since the late 1930s, it attracted renewed interest in the 1970s after Friedrich Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and following the 2008 global financial crisis. The Austrian School owes its name to members of the German historical school of economics, who argued against the Austrians during the late-19th century Methodenstreit, in which the Austrians defended the role of theory in economics as distinct from the study or compilation of historical circumstance. In 1883, Menger published Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, which attacked the methods of the historical school. Gustav von Schmoller, a leader of the historical school, responded with an unfavorable review, coining the term "Austrian School" in an attempt to characterize the school as outcast and provincial; the label was adopted by the adherents themselves. The school originated in Vienna in the Austrian Empire.
Carl Menger's 1871 book Principles of Economics is considered the founding of the Austrian School. The book was one of the first modern treatises to advance the theory of marginal utility; the Austrian School was one of three founding currents of the marginalist revolution of the 1870s, with its major contribution being the introduction of the subjectivist approach in economics. While marginalism was influential, there was a more specific school that began to coalesce around Menger's work, which came to be known as the "Psychological School", "Vienna School", or "Austrian School". Menger's contributions to economic theory were followed by those of Eugen Böhm von Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser; these three economists became. Böhm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Karl Marx in the 1880s and 1890s as was part of the Austrians' participation in the late 19th-century Methodenstreit, during which they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the historical school. Frank Albert Fetter was a leader in the United States of Austrian thought.
He obtained his PhD in 1894 from the University of Halle and was made Professor of Political Economy and Finance at Cornell in 1901. Several important Austrian economists trained at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and participated in private seminars held by Ludwig von Mises; these included Gottfried Haberler, Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Karl Menger, Oskar Morgenstern, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Abraham Wald, among others. By the mid-1930s, most economists had embraced what they considered the important contributions of the early Austrians. Fritz Machlup quoted Hayek's statement that "the greatest success of a school is that it stops existing because its fundamental teachings have become parts of the general body of accepted thought". Sometime during the middle of the 20th century, Austrian economics became disregarded or derided by mainstream economists because it rejected model building and mathematical and statistical methods in the study of economics. Mises' student Israel Kirzner recalled that in 1954, when Kirzner was pursuing his PhD, there was no separate Austrian School as such.
When Kirzner was deciding which graduate school to attend, Mises had advised him to accept an offer of admission at Johns Hopkins because it was a prestigious university and Fritz Machlup taught there. After the 1940s, Austrian economics can be divided into two schools of economic thought and the school "split" to some degree in the late 20th century. One camp of Austrians, exemplified by Mises, regards neoclassical methodology to be irredeemably flawed. Henry Hazlitt wrote economics columns and editorials for a number of publications and wrote many books on the topic of Austrian economics from the 1930s to the 1980s. Hazlitt's thinking was influenced by Mises, his book Economics in One Lesson sold over a million copies and he is known for The Failure of the "New Economics", a line-by-line critique of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. The reputation of the Austrian School rose in the late 20th century due in part to the work of Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann at New York University and to renewed public awareness of the work of Hayek after he won the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Hayek's work was influential in the revival of laissez-faire thought in the 20th century. Economist Leland Yeager discussed the late 20th century rift and referred to a discussion written by Murray Rothbar
The Bible and homosexuality
Passages in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament have been interpreted as involving same-sex sexual acts and desires. Chapters 18 and 20 of Leviticus form part of the Holiness code and list prohibited forms of intercourse, including the following verses: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. Chapter 18 verse 22 "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. Chapter 20 verse 13These two verses have been interpreted by Jews and Christians as clear overall prohibitions against homosexual acts in general. More recent interpretations focus on its context as part of the Holiness Code, a code of purity meant to distinguish the behavior of Israelites from the polytheistic Canaanites; the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis does not explicitly identify homosexuality as the sin for which they were destroyed. Some interpreters find the story of Sodom and a similar one in Judges 19 to condemn the violent rape of guests more than homosexuality, but the passage has been interpreted within Judaism and Christianity as a punishment for homosexuality due to the interpretation that the men of Sodom wished to rape the angels who retrieved Lot.
While the Jewish prophets spoke only of lack of charity as the sin of Sodom, the sexual interpretation became so prevalent among Christian communities that the name "Sodom" became the basis of the word "sodomy", still a legal synonym for homosexual and non-procreative sexual acts anal or oral sex. While the Jewish prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Zephaniah refer vaguely to the sin of Sodom, Ezekiel specifies that the city was destroyed because of its commission of social injustice: Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, fullness of bread, abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, and they were haughty, committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. The Talmudic tradition as written between c. 370 and 500 interprets the sin of Sodom as lack of charity, with the attempted rape of the angels being a manifestation of the city's violation of the social order of hospitality. Traditions on Sodom's sin, such as Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, considered it to be an illicit form of heterosexual intercourse.
In Jude 1:7 the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah are stated to have been "giving themselves over to fornication, going after strange flesh", which may refer to homosexuality or to the lust of mortals after angels. Jewish writers Philo and Josephus were the first to assert unambiguously that homosexuality was among the sins of Sodom. By the end of the 1st century Jews identified the sin of Sodom with homosexual practices; the account of the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Books of Samuel has been interpreted by traditional and mainstream Christians as a relationship only of affectionate regard, but has been interpreted by some authors as of a sexual nature. One relevant Bible passage on this issue is 1 Samuel 18:1: And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, Jonathan loved him as his own soul. Another relevant passage is 2 Samuel 1:26, where David says: I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
The story of Ruth and Naomi in the Book of Ruth is occasionally interpreted by contemporary scholars as the story of a lesbian couple. This passage has been debated by some 20th and 21st-century interpreters as to its relevance today and as to what it prohibits: although Christians of several denominations have maintained that this verse is a complete prohibition of all forms of homosexual activity, some 20th and 21st-century authors contend the passage is not a blanket condemnation of homosexual acts, among other interpretations, that the passage condemned heterosexuals who experimented with homosexual activity or that Paul's condemnation was relative to his own culture, in which homosexuality was not understood as an orientation and in which being penetrated was seen as shameful; these interpretations are in a minority. Several scholars believe these verses are part of a much larger non-Pauline interpolation, a addition to the letter. In the context of the broader immorality of his audience, Paul the Apostle wrote in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 6 verses 9-11, The Greek word arsenokoitai in verse 9 has been debated for some time, has been variously rendered as "abusers of themselves with mankind", "sodomites", or "men who have sex with men".
Greek ἄῤῥην / ἄρσην means "male", κοίτην "bed", with a sexual connotation. Paul's use of the word in 1 Corinthians is the earliest example of the term. Malakoi is a common Greek word meaning, of things subject to touch, "soft". Nowhere else in scripture is malakoi used to describe a per
Gold standard
A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. Three types can be distinguished: specie and exchange. In the gold specie standard the monetary unit is associated with the value of circulating gold coins, or the monetary unit has the value of a certain circulating gold coin, but other coins may be made of less valuable metal; the gold bullion standard is a system in which gold coins do not circulate, but the authorities agree to sell gold bullion on demand at a fixed price in exchange for the circulating currency. The gold exchange standard does not involve the circulation of gold coins; the main feature of the gold exchange standard is that the government guarantees a fixed exchange rate to the currency of another country that uses a gold standard, regardless of what type of notes or coins are used as a means of exchange. This creates a de facto gold standard, where the value of the means of exchange has a fixed external value in terms of gold, independent of the inherent value of the means of exchange itself.
Most nations abandoned the gold standard as the basis of their monetary systems at some point in the 20th century, although many hold substantial gold reserves. A 2012 survey of leading economists showed that they unanimously reject that a return to the gold standard would benefit the average American; the gold specie standard arose from the widespread acceptance of gold as currency. Various commodities have been used as money. Chemically, gold is of all major metals the one most resistant to corrosion; the use of gold as money began thousands of years ago in Asia Minor. During the early and high Middle Ages, the Byzantine gold solidus known as the bezant, was used throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. However, as the Byzantine Empire's economic influence declined, so too did the use of the bezant. In its place, European territories chose silver as their currency over gold, leading to the development of silver standards. Silver pennies based on the Roman denarius became the staple coin of Mercia in Great Britain around the time of King Offa, circa 757–796 CE.
Similar coins, including Italian denari, French deniers, Spanish dineros, circulated in Europe. Spanish explorers discovered silver deposits in Mexico in 1522 and at Potosí in Bolivia in 1545. International trade came to depend on coins such as the Spanish dollar, the Maria Theresa thaler, the United States trade dollar. In modern times, the British West Indies was one of the first regions to adopt a gold specie standard. Following Queen Anne's proclamation of 1704, the British West Indies gold standard was a de facto gold standard based on the Spanish gold doubloon. In 1717, Sir Isaac Newton, the master of the Royal Mint, established a new mint ratio between silver and gold that had the effect of driving silver out of circulation and putting Britain on a gold standard. A formal gold specie standard was first established in 1821, when Britain adopted it following the introduction of the gold sovereign by the new Royal Mint at Tower Hill in 1816; the United Province of Canada in 1854, Newfoundland in 1865, the United States and Germany in 1873 adopted gold.
The United States used the eagle as its unit, Germany introduced the new gold mark, while Canada adopted a dual system based on both the American gold eagle and the British gold sovereign. Australia and New Zealand adopted the British gold standard, as did the British West Indies, while Newfoundland was the only British Empire territory to introduce its own gold coin. Royal Mint branches were established in Sydney and Perth for the purpose of minting gold sovereigns from Australia's rich gold deposits; the gold specie standard came to an end in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire with the outbreak of World War I. From 1750 to 1870, wars within Europe as well as an ongoing trade deficit with China drained silver from the economies of Western Europe and the United States. Coins were struck in smaller and smaller numbers, there was a proliferation of bank and stock notes used as money. In the 1790s, the United Kingdom suffered a silver shortage, it ceased to mint larger silver coins and instead issued "token" silver coins and overstruck foreign coins.
With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bank of England began the massive recoinage programme that created standard gold sovereigns, circulating crowns, half-crowns and copper farthings in 1821. The recoinage of silver after a long drought produced a burst of coins; the United Kingdom struck nearly 40 million shillings between 1816 and 1820, 17 million half crowns and 1.3 million silver crowns. The 1819 Act for the Resumption of Cash Payments set 1823 as the date for resumption of convertibility, reached by 1821. Throughout the 1820s, small notes were issued by regional banks; this was restricted in 1826. In 1833 however, Bank of England notes were made legal tender and redemption by other banks was discouraged. In 1844, the Bank Charter Act established that Bank of England notes were backed by gold and they became the legal standard. According to the strict interpretation of the gold standard, this 1844 act marked the establishment of a full gold standard for British money. In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton recommended to Congress the value of a decimal system.
This system would apply to monies in the United States. The question was what type of standard: silver or both; the United States adopted a silver standard based on the Spanish milled dollar i
